Direct drug screening of patient biopsies could overcome resistance to targeted therapy

A new screening platform using cells grown directly from tumor biopsy samples may lead to truly individualized treatment strategies that would get around the problem of treatment resistance, which limits the effectiveness of current targeted therapy drugs. Researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center describe how screening samples grown from treatment-resistant tumors against a panel of current and potential targeted therapy drugs identified previously unknown resistance mechanisms, several of which could not be found by gene sequencing. Read more here.